Discussing Hotel Rwanda with friends and acquaintances earlier this year, I was struck by how much more informed about the Rwandan holocaust it seemed I had been than most of those around me. It seemed that even the UK media's extremely poor coverage of those events entirely dwarfed that provided by US network news.
That conversation popped back into my mind when I read the following in an email forwarded by a friend:
During June 2005, CNN, FOXNews, NBC/MSNBC, ABC, and CBS ran 50 times as many stories about Michael Jackson and 12 times as many stories about Tom Cruise as they did about the genocide in Darfur.
The word that keeps springing into my mind is "shocking", but really it's not. It's not a surprise, just a very sad reminder.
In this case the point of the statistics isn't merely to shock and shame; they're part of a campaign to change things. Check out Be A Witness.
Leave a comment